Taterskin & The Eco Defenders: Book 2, Chapter 40
Book 2 ("Tell It to Future Generations"), Chapter 40 of 56
CHAPTER 40
Our little contest was hugely fun, so we repeated it multiple times. By the way, whether we won the race with Terri or not depended on where the finish line was. In a short race, she would win, because she flew straight off the falls and didn’t dive first; so, she got a head start on us, so to speak, and it took us a while to catch up. So if the finish line was the first bend in the river, she would win; but if it were the second bend in the river, we would usually win. But we were enjoying ourselves to such a degree that we didn’t care a whit whether we won the race or not. We felt that we were all winners.
We did a series of Touch-and-Gos. For the uninitiated, that’s when you take off, fly around a bit, then came back and land, but without staying on the ground. Once you hit the runway (or river, or lake), you immediately accelerate and take off again. You land without stopping, that is. Humans do Touch-and-Gos because landing and taking off are the most difficult things to learn when flying (except for the fancy aerobatics, like the maneuvers Ravelle was exhibiting).
We, though, were doing the Touch-and-Gos simply for fun, and with an added twist: Instead of simple Touch-and-Gos, we were doing Touch-and-Drop-and-Gos or Touch-and-Fall-and-Gos: touch down, turn off the engine, float off the edge of the waterfall as if the world were flat and we had come to the end of it, turn the engine back on, pull up, then back down a little, level out, fly a few feet above the river and follow its twists and turns and serpentine gyrations, then up and around and back to do it all over again. Talk about exciting! It made our spirits soar!
And boy did we have fun around the campfire that night, telling and re-telling the highlights of the day to each other. That night, we slept like the proverbial logs. We spent the next day at the same type of airborne recreations, then the following day sightseeing around the area.
On the fourth day, Scarlet the Macaw flew up and told us that most of the animals had assembled at the base of Mount Roraima; in another day or so all would be there (the slowest 20% would be arriving last).
So we spent one more night enjoying the light breeze along the shore of the river, the soft grass, and the S’mores around the campfire.
In the morning, we got aboard our vehicles and headed back to our campaign headquarters on the northern fringe of the Amazon Basin.
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